Generally, all terms used herein are to be interpreted according to their ordinary meaning in the relevant technical field, unless a different meaning is clearly given and/or is implied from the context in which it is used. All references to a/an/the element, apparatus, component, means, step, etc. are to be interpreted openly as referring to at least one instance of the element, apparatus, component, means, step, etc., unless explicitly stated otherwise. The steps of any methods disclosed herein do not have to be performed in the exact order disclosed, unless a step is explicitly described as following or preceding another step and/or where it is implicit that a step must follow or precede another step. Any feature of any of the embodiments disclosed herein may be applied to any other embodiment, wherever appropriate. Likewise, any advantage of any of the embodiments may apply to any other embodiments, and vice versa. Other objectives, features, and advantages of the enclosed embodiments will be apparent from the following description.
Various Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) documents referred herein are publicly available at 29w.3gpp.org.
Overall requirements for the Next Generation (NG) architecture (see Technical Report (TR) 23.799, Study on Architecture for Next Generation) and, more specifically the NG Access Technology (see TR 38.913, Study on Scenarios and Requirements for Next Generation Access Technologies) will impact the design of Fifth Generation (5G) (see RP-160671, New SID Proposal: Study on New Radio Access Technology, DoCoMo) from mobility to control plane design and mechanisms.
It is essential to design how the basic Radio Resource Monitoring (RRM) functions, such as mobility handling, need to be distributed among Long Term Evolution (LTE) and New Radio (NR) Radio Resource Control (RRC) entities; as well as how the related control plane signaling, such as Secondary enhanced or evolved Node B (SeNB)/Secondary gNB (where gNB refers to a NR base station) change/release, should be exchanged between master and secondary nodes so that seamless mobility can be effectively supported.